Music and Opera

Our curation of music and opera reviews

Saturday

Rod Liddle Rod Liddle

Boogie aahhhnnnn

There was a sort of interesting documentary on BBC4 last night about a genre of popular music called ‘Southern Rock’ — ie what we, back in the 1970s, called Southern Boogie — Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Allman Bros, Charlie Daniels, and so on. It was interesting for mainly two reasons. First it reminded me of how truly, staggeringly, awful most of the music was — perhaps as much as 98 per cent of it. I am a catholic sorta guy when it comes to music, open to any genre, by and large. But this stuff, with its endless, interminable, identical guitar solos over the same three chugging chords and vacuous lyrics

Andrew Lambirth

In the literary tradition

In recent years there have been a number of exhibitions of Keith Vaughan’s work in commercial galleries, and his prices at auction have climbed steadily, but no major show in the nation’s museums. Yet interest in his life keeps pace with the revival in his art (the standard biography of Vaughan, by Malcolm Yorke, is long out of print and avidly sought after), and 2012 as the centenary of his birth will see the publication of a new monograph, a catalogue raisonné of his paintings and an annotated volume of his final journals. Vaughan was a good writer, and although selections from his journals have been published before (in 1966

Saturday

Peter Phillips

Early adopters

The death of Gustav Leonhardt at the age of 83 brings to an end the career of one of the giants of the early music movement. As an organist, harpsichordist and conductor he was long at the forefront of the experiments and revelations that the drive to perform music on period instruments made possible. He will be remembered for being fearless in his single-minded pursuit of what he thought his chosen repertoires required. And he was producing peerless recordings of those repertoires right from the beginning which — one forgets — was in the late ’40s. The term ‘early music’, and its demanding fellow traveller ‘authenticity’, have had a long

Thursday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Earl Scruggs, 1924-2012

The man who was probably the greatest banjo player in history has died, aged 88. Steve Martin says everything that needs to be said here. Here he and Earl are performing the immortal Foggy Mountain Breakdown.

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

Touching the void | 17 March 2012

In April, for the first time in ages, I am going to a wedding. At least it will make a change from all the funerals. The middle-aged pop fan feels this all the more deeply, because few of our favourite musicians seem to make old bones. Or, more accurately, they make old bones, but at three or four times the speed that everyone else does. Some of these rock deaths are relatively mundane: falling down stairs (Sandy Denny), car crashing into a tree (Marc Bolan), ski-ing into a tree (Sonny Bono). Others are bizarre. It was Chicago’s guitarist Terry Kath, of course, whose career came to a premature end during

Michael Henderson

Spirit of Schubert

Every December, for the past decade, I have laid a red rose on Schubert’s grave in Vienna’s southern cemetery. What began as a gesture has become a custom, a way of giving thanks to the most lovable of all composers. Schubert may not be as great as Bach or Beethoven, who established the musical language of an entire culture, but no musician has touched so many hearts. Blessed Franz, holy Franz, immortal Franz: nobody, not even Mozart, has inspired such love. The details of Schubert’s last days are well known. In March 1827 he walked behind Beethoven’s coffin and, upon repairing to a local inn to toast the memory of

Saturday

Peter Phillips

Anthems for the Queen

The Choirbook for the Queen, which has recently been launched, is a remarkable initiative, involving most of the leading Church musicians of our day and many philanthropists besides. The idea behind it is simple enough: to put together a collection of anthems (I use the word precisely) to celebrate the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, with the added intention of showcasing ‘the excellence of choral writing and the continuation of the choral tradition by cathedral choirs and other choral foundations around the country’. Already in place is a plan for 80 of our cathedral and collegiate choirs to sing two of these anthems each this year, some to be broadcast on the

Saturday

Saturday

Charles Spencer

Parental guidance

Whisper it ever so quietly, but I think we might just be through the worst that winter has to throw at us. I’m writing this down in Dorset, and though there was a ferocious wind at West Bay, whipping up huge waves that broke spectacularly over the pier, and a peculiarly spiteful heavy shower, precisely angled so that the rain penetrated deep into my left ear as I walked along the prom, it was nothing like as cold as it has been. Better still, the roadside verges in our village of Netherbury are blessed with beautiful clumps of snowdrops, planted by the brilliant local wildlife photographer Colin Varndell and a

Lucy Vickery

The Wow factor

Next month, a formidable band of women will take to the stage at the Southbank Centre for the Women of the World Festival, now in its second year. The line-up includes veteran Annie Lennox, who will perform with rising stars Katy B, Jess Mills, and Brit Award winner Emeli Sandé as part of an eclectic menu of music, comedy, poetry, debates and workshops that cover topics ranging from domestic violence to vajazzling. But if Eighties icons and trends in personal grooming leave you cold, there is plenty more on offer. Top of my list is Irish actress Lisa Dwan’s (above) adaptation as a one-woman play of Beside the Sea, a

Marcus Berkmann

A deafening silence

One morning in 2007, the music critic Nick Coleman woke up to find that he was profoundly deaf in one ear. ‘The silence did not descend silently, however. It made a small sound. You might compare it to the sound of a kitten dropping on to a pillow.’ Within an hour this pffff had developed a pulse, and over the next few days it evolved into an unceasing clamour of clanks, zizzes and whistles. By now Coleman was in hospital and doctors were scratching their heads, as they usually do with tinnitus. I can remember the eyes of my doctor glazing over with boredom when I told him about my

Saturday

Marcus Berkmann

The big push

We are all just trying to make a living here, obviously. Musicians are no different. There are so many of them now, several generations of them, for the old ones never stop and new ones seem to appear every day. To make any impression at all, then, you need what sportsmen call ‘momentum’. That’s the mass of your talent multiplied by the velocity of hype. And so, each year, exciting young singer-songwriters are propelled into the public gaze, release records that aren’t quite as great as expected and are then mercilessly slagged off by everyone. This year it’s the turn of the young American singer Lana Del Rey, whose enigmatic

Saturday

Peter Phillips

Easy listening | 11 February 2012

There is only one place these days where the music of Charles Villiers Stanford (1852–1924) sends its hearers into reliable ecstasy, and that is in choirs and places where they sing. Otherwise he is something of a bust. Despite having written seven symphonies, nine operas, 11 concertos (including three piano, two violin, a cello and a clarinet), eight string quartets and countless songs, piano pieces and other chamber works, he is now celebrated for a tiny fraction of his output. Stanford himself thought that to be renowned as a composer of Anglican Church music was not enough. He wanted to be measured alongside international (i.e., German) stars, and so went

Andrew Petrie

A bite of the Apple

For the first time in its 170-year history, the New York Philharmonic Orchestra has a native New Yorker at the helm. Music director Alan Gilbert (above) brings the band to the Barbican this month for a brief residency that crams four concerts into a little over 48 hours, starting with a performance of Mahler’s Ninth on 16 February. Later concerts include the UK première of Polaris, a ‘Voyage for Orchestra’ by Thomas Adès, and Lang Lang tackling Bartók’s famously arduous Piano Concerto No. 2. The residency will also see small groups of musicians venturing beyond the concert hall to perform for residents of East London housing estates as part of

Saturday

Ed Rex

Beyond the elite

There are few art forms with more colossal barriers to entry than classical music. Picture yourself finally plucking up the courage to go to your first classical concert. You arrive late, because at that gig last Saturday you had to sit through two ill-judged warm-up acts, an act of charity you’re not inclined to repeat; but here, even the slightest tardiness has you waiting outside until that gruelling pause, presumably marked in the programme, when the orchestra falls silent, the conductor slowly and disapprovingly turns to look at the doors, and you and a couple of other heathen shuffle in, mumbling about taxis and Bob Crow. What’s more, you go

Saturday

Charles Spencer

Out and about

We are already more than halfway through January and I am still managing to stick heroically to my new year’s resolution. This is to keep smoking throughout 2012 — with a particularly large intake of nicotine and tar planned for the dreaded Olympic Games when everyone will be banging on about the glories of physical fitness. There will be no end of temptations to quit, of course. I was at a wonderful dinner party over the festive period, held, romantically, in a candlelit, lovingly restored vintage railway carriage. When I announced I was going to nip outside for a fag, the hostess looked at me with a mixture of disbelief

Saturday

Alex Massie Alex Massie

Saturday Morning Country: Townes van Zandt

This ain’t necessarily Townes at his best. Then again, the singing was never the biggest point of TvZ. But of all his songs this is close to being my favourite and not just because it means much to at least one other person. Self-indulgent? Sure. But so what? This is a blog. My blog, actually.

Saturday